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With a minimum of grace and not a word of regret, the city of Montreal said this week that it would “respect the decision” of Quebec’s access-to-information commission ordering it to retrieve long-secret financial records from the organizing committee of the World Aquatics Championships in 2005. The commission’s ruling was a victory for The Gazette, which has been trying for seven years to examine those records.

The FINA World Aquatics Championship held in Montreal in 2005 went off the rails almost from the beginning as organizers struggled to meet the financial demands of a world-class sports event that were far more costly than they had originally envisioned.

Where did the money go? Of the millions of taxpayer dollars that the federal and provincial governments and the city of Montreal poured into the scandal-plagued, money-losing FINA World Aquatics Championships held in 2005.

Montreal’s mishandling of the debt-ridden FINA World Aquatics Championships in 2005 should serve as a cautionary tale as the city plans year-long celebrations for its 375th anniversary in 2017, says an expert in governance.

The financial and personal meltdowns that came during the organization of the 2005 FINA World Aquatics Championships in Montreal has taught the city to be much more proactive when it comes to hosting international events, Mayor Gérald Tremblay said Friday.

In the days before its chief executive, Yvon DesRochers, killed himself, the committee organizing Montreal's 2005 World Aquatics Championships was under such financial pressure that board members got daily emails detailing how much money was spent that day.

Vilified in the press, facing a federal investigation into what happened to millions of dollars pledged to a swim meet that will probably never take place, the head of Montreal's failed bid for the World Aquatics Championships took his own life yesterday, with a bullet to the head.

Mayor Gerald Tremblay has flown to Paris to sell Montreal.
But even as he prepared his pitch, others were joining the list of cities hoping to replace Montreal as host of July's World Aquatics Championships.

In a stinging rejection of a last-gasp effort from Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay, the Federation Internationale de Natation insisted late yesterday it is sticking to its guns and has pulled the plug on Montreal as site of July's World Aquatics Championships, expecting to place the event elsewhere.

The governing body of swimming in Canada is overjoyed at Montreal having been selected to play host to the 2005 world aquatic championships, and hopes there will be significant investment to ensure this nation will have a strong team at the event.

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